The BBC has largely been the Mouthpiece of UK Government arround the world and most times the choice and language of news by the BBC is in tandem with whatever is the UK Foreign policy. Even though this news has been put together by someone with Nigerian decent I smell a British Foreign Policy change towards Nigeria in the light of International Security Threats of this day and age.

I also found the collussion of David Milliban with Hillary Clinton and French Foreign Minister strange. Because the British Historically prefers to conceal all the ills in Nigeria in the hope to continue to sustain the hegemony.

Also Obama has been critical of Nigerian leadership recently.

So is the WEST tired of sustaining the Nigerian Hegemony and considering a disintegrated Nigeria so as to prevent the oil in the Gulf of Guinea to be controlled by Al-Qaeda appologists of the North and potential Arab league allies?

This peach by Shola Odunfa captures this fact.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8493711.stm

See also excerpts from the write up which presents some of the thought process of Hillary Rodham Clinton. is she considering a disintegrated Nigeria along majority Religious lines?
Keep in mind that under this arrangement Plateau and Benue have the choice of joining the Christain South if they so wish.

About 10 years ago an American research institute predicted the collapse of the Nigerian state in 15 years.

Last week, Mrs Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, issued her own critique which was not less cheering.

I often ask myself: Should Nigeria break up, how many countries will it produce?

I am not aware that any three of its more than 200 ethnic groups sincerely agree so much as to come together in a peaceful independent state.

There is so much distrust that any major national crisis can only lead to civil wars here and there but at the end of the day the leaders will contrive a common interest and settle for a truce.

With time the party will resume.

Yar'Adua camp blocks the way out of impasse
By William Wallis

Published: February 5 2010 02:00 | Last updated: February 5 2010 02:00

The most creative of writers might struggle to conjure up a scenario to match the drama playing out in Nigeria today.

The involuntary absence of Umaru Yar'Adua, the 58-year-old president, on health grounds is into its third month and Nigeria's institutions are at loggerheads over how to respond.

The Senate called on the president last week to hand over formally to his deputy, Goodluck Jonathan, an act that might ease tensions and forestall a constitutional crisis. The federal courts have been ambivalent, offering divergent rulings in a string of cases designed to force the government's hand.

Mr Yar'Adua's cabinet and inner circle however, are bent on postponing the day of reckoning.

"When the cat's away, the mice come out to play," says a government insider, alluding to the corrupt dealmaking going on and the opportunism bred by the leadership vacuum.

In the 10 years since the military relinquished power, Nigeria, with its population of 150m, vast energy resources and pool of talent, has shown tantalising glimpses of potential as a motor for regional economic and political revival. In its current rudderless form, however, those with a stake in Africa's future are more preoccupied with the dangers it represents. Apart from a clutch of doctors, close aides and the redoubtable first lady, Turai, no one is sure how unwell Mr Yar'Adua is. He might be dying. He could be poised to return to office, as some cabinet members insist. Or, as seems likely, he may be chronically weakened by the heart condition and underlying kidney ailment that led to his emergency admission to hospital in Saudi Arabia in November.

Regardless, a growing number of Nigerians, including former heads of state, are convinced that it is not in the national interest for him to cling to office from his sick bed.

In the absence of a functioning head of state, reforms governing the electoral system, oil industry and banking sector are stalling. Political uncertainty has forced hundreds of millions of dollars of investment on to the back-burner, according to business people.

Regional and ethnic tensions, never far from the surface, are bubbling up, putting the uneasy federation that joins rival regions, religions and ethnic groups under strain.

Hundreds of lives were lost in an outbreak of communal violence in the central city of Jos last month. Now the truce in the Niger delta that has allowed oil production to recover since an amnesty for militants kicked in last year is unravelling. With oil at $75 a barrel, there might be money enough to grease the wheels of the patronage system. But for Nigerians who eke a living outside it, the leadership crisis has brought the cynical abuse of power by politicians purporting to represent them back into stark relief.

On cue, there have been rumblings in the army ranks, serious enough to encourage the defence chiefs to restrict troop movements and caution soldiers against compromising the army's neutral role. The chance of a successful coup is remote but talk of it should sound a warning in a country with an history of army misrule.

It is baffling, therefore, that Mr Yar'Adua is so reluctant to let Mr Jonathan take over, at least in the interim.

Is the president too sick to take the decision himself? Or has it been made for him by aides with personal interests in keeping his presidency going at all costs?

Because of a glitch in the constitution - bequeathed to Nigeria by the military in 1999 - the ministers with most to lose if power changes hands are those with the final word on whether the president is fit enough to rule.

The president and vice-president represent different regional interest groups and rival factions within the ruling People's Democratic party. So those who owe Mr Yar'Adua their jobs would lose out should Mr Jonathan take over.

There is a clear enough route out of Nigeria's political impasse. Yet Mr Yar'Adua's lieutenants are gambling with the country's future by blocking the way.
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Nigeria's northern elite fights to keep power
By Tom Burgis in Kaduna

Published: February 5 2010 02:00 | Last updated: February 5 2010 02:00

Down a parched road, behind a rusting metal door, lies the tomb of northern Nigeria's most celebrated leader.

Legend holds that when the structure collapsed a few years ago the exposed body of Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto and standard bearer of the northern elite, had been miraculously preserved as it was on the day he was shot in January 1966.

Today, that same elite, once regarded as the nation's arbiter of power, stands divided and the region is in turmoil. President Umaru Yar'Adua, the latest northern-born leader, lies apparently incapacitated in his third month in a Saudi Arabian hospital.

A young northerner, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab , allegedly tried to blow up a US airliner on Christmas day in the name of al-Qaeda . The region is reeling from the latest ethnic and religious violence that saw hundreds killed in and around the city of Jos last month.

With a succession struggle looming, the name of the Sardauna , a traditional military title, is invoked as a symbol of lost unity. The political tussle between the north's old establishment and a new breed of younger leaders could be decisive in charting the course of Africa's most populous nation.

"The big problem today is that the north is not the north we used to know," says a former presidential adviser. "In the old days, five or six of them would choose the candidate [for president]. Now it is fractured. The northern leadership is too old. The young Turks are no longer willing to listen."

With its predominantly Muslim population bound together by a common language, Hausa, the north is home to more of Nigeria's 150m people than the largely Christian south. The nation's wealth in the form of prodigious oil reserves lies under southern soils, but the north has traditionally held the political power, producing a string of military and civilian rulers.

Yet when the generals handed power to civilians in 1999, northern elders backed Olusegun Obasanjo, a southerner, for president. Their shock when he purged northern officers and nurtured a fresh generation of northern politicians still reverberates.

As the power of an old guard who cut their teeth in the decades after independence from Britain in 1960 wanes, a new batch of leaders has emerged. To their critics, many of these young Turks are products of a political system that diverts revenues from Africa's biggest energy sector into a vast patronage network.

The old guard's detractors counter that it was under them that institutions were corrupted. Far from being a golden age, their era was fraught with coups, civil war and the beginning of the economy's decline.

The north's once-thriving industries have collapsed under the weight of smuggling, corruption and a failing electricity grid. Only lizards occupy boarded-up textile factories ; a buoyant agricultural sector is a fading memory; young beggars gather among traffic. Official data show that in three northern states, more than half of all children under five are underweight, far more than in the south.

Today's leadership crisis has laid bare the elders' waning authority. Some northern statesmen have upbraided the cabinet for failing to insist that Mr Yar'Adua hand over interim powers to his vice-president, Goodluck Jonat-han , a southerner who has been forging alliances in the north. But the ruling People's Democratic party - not the north's ageing intellectuals and religious leaders - calls the shots.

Half a dozen state governors and ministers from the new breed are possible contenders for the presidency in elections scheduled for next year, vying with former intelligence chiefs and retired officers favoured by the old guard.

"[The old guard] do not have the power to stop the young Turks," says Shehu Sani, a democracy activist in Kaduna, the Sardauna's resting place.

"But they have a capacity to make things uncomfortable for them."

That many in the north appear to have turned their backs on Mr Yar'Adua betrays the internal divisions. The president hails from Katsina, in the far north, and is resented by many who feel he has failed to share the benefits of office and revive the region's economy.

For Yusuf Maitama Sule, an elder statesman from the ancient northern city of Kano, the fusion of political and commercial power lies at the root not only of the north's disintegration but also Nigeria's ills. "Sardauna used to tell us . . . 'you can't be running and scratching your buttocks at the same time'. You can't be in government and do business at the same time," he says.

Now 80 and blind, he adds: "Today . . the politician, he's not thinking of the national interests but his own personal interest, making money. That is why there is chaos."
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Power Vacuum Leaves Nigeria on Life Support
Lauren Gelfand | Bio | 04 Feb 2010
World Politics Review


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When Nigerian President Umaru Yar'Adua left the country in November 2009 to seek treatment for a heart ailment, few anticipated that both he and Africa's most populous country would end up on life support.

The leadership crisis resulting from Yar'Adua's failure to constitutionally hand over power to Vice President Goodluck Jonathan -- either at the time of his departure or since -- has had more than just political implications for Nigeria. It has rocked the oil sector and threatened to undo substantial security gains made in the oil-producing Niger Delta, following a mostly successful amnesty and demobilization program for the region's largest rebel group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).

The power vacuum has also reinforced international and domestic fears about the insidious level of corruption -- considered the largest obstacle to foreign investment -- at all levels of government, exacerbated by the absence of a head of state to impose some level of transparency on public spending. Complicating matters even further, the timing could not be worse, with Nigeria caught in the uncomfortable glare of the international spotlight over the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack on an American airliner by one of its nationals.

One bright spot, however, has been the army's very public reluctance to implicate itself in the political crisis. For a country that has only recently made the transition to civilian government after years of coups and military rule, the decision by the armed forces not only to stand aside during the political turmoil but also to warn against any attempts at coup-plotting speaks volumes about the professionalization of the force.

Just how long the armed forces will remain outside the fray remains to be seen, however. Already, soldiers have been called in to break up sectarian violence in the city of Jos, where a land dispute flared into three days of clashes between Muslims and Christians in January, leaving more than 400 people dead by the time order was restored.

Analysts are carefully watching the rivalry between the predominantly Christian south and mostly Muslim north, fearing that it could spill over in the time it takes to resolve the leadership crisis. That, in turn, would muddy the waters ahead of the electoral campaign to choose a successor for Yar'Adua in polls set for 2011.

The president left Nigeria for Saudi Arabia on Nov. 23, seeking treatment for a heart ailment that has only added to previous health problems, which include a chronic kidney condition. Since then, the government has provided little information about his condition. It was only when the U.K.-based Daily Telegraph published a story on Jan. 11 citing sources in both the U.K. and Nigeria that he was "mostly brain-dead" that Yar'Adua broke his silence and appeared in public.

Rather than assuaging the growing discontent with the power vacuum atop a government that is fractious and unstable in the best of times, however, Yar'Adua's assurances rang hollow. In the weeks since, there has been a mounting campaign within the legislature and the ranks of the political elite -- not to mention Nigeria's wide-ranging political opposition -- for the president to formally notify parliament of his absence from office. This would effectively hand power, albeit temporarily, to Jonathan.

Stacked with members of his ruling People's Democratic Party, the cabinet has instead passed two consecutive resolutions insisting Yar'Adua remains fit to govern.

Although the international financial and currency markets have yet to respond in one way or another to the continuing crisis, signs of a complete meltdown are mounting. If one occurs, the implications could extend well beyond Nigeria into West Africa, a region in which it exercises a leadership role in most things political, economic and security-related.

MEND announced on Feb. 1 that it would suspend a ceasefire imposed since last October, urging a resumption of hostilities against oil producers. Almost immediately, three oil installations were attacked, although MEND officially denied responsibility.

Writing in the Feb. 1 Financial Times, Louise Arbour, director of the think tank International Crisis Group, gave voice to the increasingly persistent and worried thoughts expressed by Nigeria's allies and partners.

"The next days and weeks will determine whether Nigeria's politicians are able to restore constitutional order. For the sake of the country -- and the whole of West Africa -- Nigeria's friends must insist that all parties, including the military, respect the constitution and its provisions for managing this kind of crisis," she wrote.

"If Abuja does not resolve the impasse over its leadership and return governance to a clear constitutional track very soon, it will spell disaster."

According to the vice president, Yar'Adua is expected to return to Nigeria before the end of February. It remains to be seen, however, whether his convalescence will coincide with the badly needed healing of a country that is, if not adrift, rudderless. Whoever ends up stepping into Nigeria's power vacuum, the country will need a firm hand to manage financial and sectarian interests that threaten to compromise one of the continent's crucial economic engines.

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=5071